Content Strategy, Part 3: Digging into the Fundamentals

“The content strategy will spell out the staffing and resource requirements, which could be some of the more challenging decision processes, if not out-and-out contentious ones. Change is not easy. I believe that the learning organization offers experience with content development and learning solution design, while the marketing organization and its Web-content group offer innovation and capabilities to influence and manage audience responsiveness.”

Welcome to the “Content Era.” It’s here, it’s now, and it’s
a game-changer. Some believe the way to play is by jumping in headfirst. Others
want to meet the challenges by attempting to retain a sense of order and
control. Yet others are just wondering what it all means.

Forget control – there is no longer a chance to control
content. The real way to get into the action and serve the interests of our
organizations, and their audiences, just requires content strategy.

Fundamental Three revisited: Making audits better

I ended the previous article in this series (Naked Truths and Fundamentals) with Fundamental Three on analysis and
audits.

I want to step back and add a few additional words on audits.
Content represents tangible things – assets in many formats and forms. Content has
identity. It has a name, key-word associations, tags, and other structure; and
these characteristics make content useful. The strategy is about content value.
Content represents ideas, concepts, advice, insight, direction, understanding,
and much more. We say it is the knowledge of our business. How important is
that?

Content resides in various places, often called repositories
– some more useful than others. So, this Fundamental
Three of accurate and reliable inventories and audits is crucial (and essential) in
the fight for purposeful content and for an ability to understand what it is,
and what it can do. Conducting an inventory has significant value, although it
is also prone to errors and inconsistencies. My personal interest and quest
are for better ways to conduct the analysis and audit activities. I’d like a tool
to expedite and improve the quality and sophistication of content inventory
development and auditing.

You can help in this effort to make things better. If you’ve
done content audits or have a methodology, techniques, or a tool in your
learning organization or elsewhere, please leave a comment at the end of this
article about what you have, or are doing. Or, if you have some incredible
ideas, would you please share them? In particular:

Disregard all technology limitations. What would
“the magic content analysis and audit tool” be for superior qualifying and
quantifying knowledge assets and information sources? What would it do? How should
it work?

If an automated tool is not the ticket, and would not add value to manual processes, why not? Tell me what you do. Tell me why your
audit approach can’t be replicated in some automated magical app?

Share what types of content get audited; and
what problems you faced or are facing?

Finish by explaining what collaboration you had
(or have) across the organization?

If you have a lot to say, I’m happy to entertain a richer personal
exchange. Reach out to me directly.

Fundamental Four: Channels

On to Fundamental Four(Channels make your content available).
Channels are the roadways for content delivery. This is predominately about
“broadband” communications, although we have everything from classrooms and
video conferencing to Webinars and self-paced events – all expanded by mobile
and tablet computing. These smart-device learning experiences are huge
differentiators. Not just in terms of the devices, but also how these
instruments are changing the functional characteristics of “learning domains.”

New taxonomy

So, move over Bloom. Let’s make room for new elements of
taxonomy. The digital device phenomena are driving how we know. It’s “fingertip
knowledge.” Nobody imagined such a notion of knowledge before portable
computing, and in particular the digital revolution.

Look at Bloom’s Taxonomy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_Taxonomy).
Skills in the cognitive domain revolve around knowledge, comprehension,
and critical thinking on a particular topic. Traditional education tends to
emphasize the skills in this domain. A definition of knowledge (Bloom et al.
1956, page 201) is that it “involves
the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or
the recall of a pattern, structure, or setting.”

My cognitive skill development relies more frequently on the
increase in content mobilization. I know because I have immediacy of discovery
and access to knowledge resources. As David Weinberger in his book Too Big to Know postulates, “We are in a
crisis of knowledge.” We are moving to a framework that he calls a “network of knowledge.”
In my network I can connect as one or more nodes and tap into knowledge through
elaborate searches. If content important to me has identity through the
networks that I travel, I get it. These assets come to me because they possess
identity created through tagging with a purposeful discovery schema. I do not
have to perform mental “recall” tasks to have “knowledge.” I just connect to my
network.

Strategy and context

But I digress. While the Internet dominates the marketplace,
it’s not the only way we deliver content. What we have to understand is how our
channels work to contribute to the objectives of a learning initiative, and
more importantly to business goals. Understanding what channels are available
to you through your organization is a very important consideration. Strategy is how we get the goal that we all
want: serving audiences with the right content, at the right time, and in the
right format.

Combining user contexts (for example: job preferences,
situation, location, and device) to support intended purpose and other user requirements
is something that a solid strategy can help with. The new technology today, from
both CMS (Content Management System) and learning-technology vendors, is
introducing increasingly sophisticated profiling and presentation functionality
to implement elaborate display logic. The logic occurs because the content
management capabilities capture the metadata and other configuration elements. Now
the content has intelligence enough to be discoverable and accessible.

Content channel distribution strategy

It comes down to a content channel distribution strategy,
whichdefines what
types of access and availability there will be for users and in what contexts and forms it will occur. Distribution strategy is the approach that
provides your audiences the ability to find and use information from your
content sources. It’s not, as some describe it, a “marketing tactic”; nor is it
confined to a type of connection for accessing the content.

Right now, too much emphasis is on the technology used to
obtain content, which creates some confusion because the reference to channels
is not just about the connectivity or device delivery, but the media and
message as well. The maximum user experience occurs because there is a
combination of connection type and media type. An excellent business case is
“performance support.” What provides an individual on the job with real-time
content to solve a “just-in-time” problem may be a video segment, a PDF of a
document, or a live chat with a subject matter expert (SME) in your
organization. Or, maybe it is some combination of all these various media types
(Figure 1).

Figure 1: Media types

While the device may support the connection and format of
the content, it really is about what the
content does for the individual. Your organization has to examine what
channels people are using and how. Certain measures or analytics are most helpful
in understanding the impact of what is being accomplished within the channels. Then
there is the decision about what an organization’s appetite for additional or bolder channels is. These decisions
impact budgets, resources, and schedules. They also have prospects for
increasing the value of the learning or knowledge experience. And, it can
significantly improve context – relevance and reliability of content at the
user end.

Still, many in the learning world are responding to the
clamor for technology to adapt to information transformation and transmission
requirements occurring in our changing digital climate. However, this response has
to do with “display” and “throughput” and not the essence of why you need a content
strategy in the first place. Think “content consumer.”

Here’s the deal – we used to live in a world where the
producers of content determined the channels of distribution. Now, we live in a
world where the consumers of content determine the channels. In fact, they have
their own access to channels, which make this story even more interesting. First,
your audiences will find you only if you know what channels they are tuning
into. And, second, your success at engaging them will be a matter of connection
– does the content fix their “context.”

Fundamental Five: It’s not about the technology

This leads me to Fundamental
Five(It’s a field of dreams). Now
let’s dial in on technology; but, before I start, here’s my disclaimer. I
purposely made technology the fifth fundamental because many people allow themselves to be persuaded, or are persuaded
by outside sources, that they can solve their content problems with technology. Wrong!

You can’t possibly decide what technology is to do until you
decide what your content needs to do and how and for whom it needs to do it. Need
I say that it again? Content strategy
comes first and it concerns technology, but it is not about technology.

Now, as noted in the first article of this series, “Content
Strategy: What It Is, and Why you Need It,” satisfying channel requirements is
dependent on having an information architecture and content management efforts.
In part, the work is a product of the strategy, which should have produced a “proposed
model” of the ideal composition of technology for the solution. A caution here
is that strategy should avoid the belief that you must build on what you have. The ideal should not be encumbered with
old or even current technology baggage.

With the “ideal” model in hand, take stock of known and
existing technology resources in your organization. Examine the technology in
terms of its functionality and map it to the strategic content requirements. Included
in the examination should be some measure of how well it fits the need and some
evaluation of any upgrades or additions from the technology vendor(s), which
may help achieve greater fulfillment of the needs for your content work. During
this venture, you will want to leverage your organization’s current investments,
when feasible. However, as you evolve your solution, shortcomings may warrant
taking an alternative path – up to and including abandonment of existing
technology. It has to be about the content.

Technology must begin as a solution for aggregating,
ingesting, tagging, housing, organizing, creating, reusing, repurposing, navigating,
searching, and managing of all content. And, each of these characteristics
breaks down into specific functions, which extend into particular applications.
When looking at vendors, do not expect that there is a single-source solution. Note: I said nothing about delivery.

The solution will be the integration of technologies, into a content experience eco-system (Figure 2). Some technology
comes from outside what we call the “learning industry.” The best description of
my view of the architecture is a “mashup” of various component and application
technologies, which live and work as one. By the way, today’s solutions more
often reside external to the IT organization and function on a “platform as a
hosted service” and “infrastructure as a hosted service” (PaaS/IaaS) on top of
which are the integrated applications offered through a software-as-a-service
(SaaS) model.

My depiction is a glimpse at possibilities. You may discover
that your organization has elements of this architecture. The question is
whether you can leverage it for the larger required solution. The beautiful
thing today is the greater commitment by vendors to “open source” and “Web services”
solutions as companions to some vendors’ APIs (application programming
interfaces). And, the structure is already virtualized and in the “Cloud.”

The point is that your solution has nothing to do with my
depiction. Your organizational requirements are about doing what your content
needs to do. Build it to suit your strategy, and they will come.

Fundamental Six: Execution

Now to Fundamental Six(It’s alive). Execution. It does not
matter that the content is faultless and the technology superior. Bringing it
to life is the most exciting, rewarding, and daunting of all the labors – and
the work is continuous and untiring. A successful payoff on content strategy
requires organization and determination with a broad-based collaboration across
all major divisions of the organization. The strategy must contemplate the type
of organization, resources, structure, processes, and diversity of job
experience necessary to accommodate the new solution and the technology behind
it.

As the less-than-complete graphic illustrates, there are many
pieces in the content management puzzle, each imposing its own rigor,
processes, and structure (Figure 3). The ability to manage it all is distributed
around the organization, because content is simply a product generated from
many sources inside and outside the enterprise.

Figure 3: Content
Management Elements

Not surprisingly, the emerging mastermind and exerciser of
ownership and oversight across the content landscape is what we could call a learning architect. That role in
American enterprise more regularly seems to be falling on the shoulders of the chief
learning officer (CLO). In businesses where I have exposure, the real
embodiment of the CLO job is someone with a background that goes beyond
learning to include marketing and communications with a bit of product development
experience and customer service or sales thrown in for good measure.

In all instances, this master architect is a professional
capable of garnering collaboration from executive management peers – someone
who is conversant with current thinking in media (particularly related to the Web
and mobile worlds), as well as being up-to-date on developments in learning and
technology. The person is comfortable both in the boardroom and with tackling
smaller critical tasks. The important functionaries of today’s learning
practice will move from instructional design to content curation and from LMS
administration to CEM administration (content experience management, a term
that I am just now bantering about to define the unique platform,
infrastructure, and software application mashup). The organizational
contributors are many and varied, with a convergence of human capital from Web content
writers and editors to learning content programmers and developers. As content types
continue a move to greater interactivity and video, we’ll see more production
geared to audio and video where classrooms become studios with “sets.”

The content strategy will spell out the staffing and
resource requirements, which could be some of the more challenging decision
processes, if not out-and-out contentious ones. Change is not easy. I believe
that the learning organization offers experience with content development and learning
solution design, while the marketing organization and its Web content group offer
innovation and capabilities to influence and manage audience responsiveness. You
should take neither group for granted nor discount them. Both groups, with
other content sources, have to own the strategy.

Execution will be about a content team as pragmatic (and
spiritual) hands-on performers managed by leadership expecting to exploit,
expose, and extend the value of content, particularly for knowledge transformation
and acquisition.

I am depending on you!

Do you want to offer your organization millions of found
dollars — literally? Then create the means to mine the value of content. Open
up the digital markets. Double down on investments to create and manage
content.

How? Rethink the way you create, manage, publish, and
deliver content. Liberate yourself from the production processes, technologies,
and ideas that just do not cut it. To succeed in the digital revolution think
differently. Adopt a content strategy that takes into account business goals
and insures that the strategy is socially-enabled, always-on, location-aware,
globally-connected, and capable of responding to the device-dependent world.

Adopting a content strategy is the first step. However,
success occurs with the re-engineering of production processes. You have to
transform content in ways that allow greater efficiency and effectiveness – automatically
and on-demand. And, the content has to support an increasing array of formats capable
of being contextually adapted for the content consumer. That will require adopting
new tools, technologies, standards, approaches, roles, and responsibilities.

Make content multichannel. Make content findable for a worldwide
multilingual audience. Make content smart-appliance adaptable. Make it
Intelligent Content!

References

Weinberger,
David, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge
Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person
in the Room is the Room, Basic Books, New York, NY 2011.

Continuing the discussion of how to build a strategy for orderly content creation, this exploration of what
content is expands on the first three Fundamentals and introduces a content strategy framework.

Anyone and everyone seems to be creating content for learning, but how well is that content put
together? To have a successful “open door” policy on content creation, we need a strategy to
ensure orderliness in our messy world of learning. Part one of three parts on how to build that
strategy.

Mention “assessment” and many of us think of “tests,” and of the associated anxiety. This can taint our thinking about
evaluation within the corporate environment. But in fact assessment is a valuable tool that can aid improvement in learning
and in business results. Here is a quick review of the benefits.